1y ago

[Done] Lemmy world was upgraded to 0.18.3 today (2023-07-30)

Update The upgrade was done, DB migrations took around 5 minutes. We'll keep an eye out for (new) issues but for now it seems to be OK.

Original message We will upgrade lemmy.world to 0.18.3 today at 20:00 UTC+2 (Check what this isn in your timezone). Expect the site to be down for a few minutes. ""Edit"" I was warned it could be more than a few minutes. The database update might even take 30 minutes or longer.

Release notes for 0.18.3 can be found here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/RELEASES.md

(This is unrelated to the downtimes we experienced lately, those are caused by attacks that we're still looking into mitigating. Sorry for those)

142 comments

Sorry for those
It's not your fault :) We know you admins are working really hard to keep the server as stable as possible.
- Don't humanize them, they'll expect us to always treat them with respect! /s (obvs 🙄)

Add controversial ranking
Change logic for determining comment default language
Add infinite scroll user option
Neat. I hope the comment language logic change means the default won't be "Undetermined" anymore.

I'm sure the attacks are just as annoying for you guys as they are to us, if not more. Appreciate the update.
Edit: Loving the endless scroll for the front page! I've been eagerly awaiting that. Such a small change, but such a big impact.

Release notes for 0.18.3 can be found here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/RELEASES.md
- Thanks, added to the post

see what time this is in your time zone
- Thanks, will put this in the post
  
  Fwiw, it can be helpful to call out the date for such changes. Preferably in YYYY-MM-DD (ISO 8601).
  While it's helpful to link to an off-site timezone converter tool (thanks for that, btw), "today" can be a different date, depending on where in the world you are. For example, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.

Great! Thanks for keeping things up to date and running!

Really liking the transparency with the community over how the server is doing.
Great work.

Minor suggestion: write your time zones like UTC+2 and not CEST. I'm pretty sure most people outside Europe don't know what the time zone CEST is. Yes, you provided a link that helpfully converts the time to the users' local time zone, but sometimes it's nicer to be able to know something without having to click into a link.
- OK, updating the post
  
  Wow, you actually changed it! I was kind of shocked when I came back to my feed seeing UTC+2 in the title. Thanks! :D
- it would be nice if Lemmy had support for formatting Unix timestamps in whatever timezone whoever is looking at it is in, like discord
  
  That could be fixed in the apps and UI:s as a cosmetical improvement based on a timezone entered in the user settings. UTC is... universal.
  
  The problem with open-source for me is reading ideas like this and having to deal with the frustration of not knowing how to write it myself.

This version brings major optimizations to the database queries, which significantly reduces CPU usage. There is also a change to the way federation activities are stored, which reduces database size by around 80%.
Is it me or is the 80% figure just insane? Are there any benchmarks to see how fast this has become versus say Lemmy 0.18.2 on a very large instance?
- Is it me or is the 80% figure just insane?
  Not really, you'd be surprised how often systems are bloated all because of a single option, character, etc. Most developers don't start optimizing until much later in the software's lifecycle. Often enough, it is easily overlooked. That's why code reviews are needed often with fresh pair of eyes.
  Just to set the expectations, reducing database size or CPU usage does not necessarily mean it is faster but it does mean there's more free capacity on the servers to handle more users at the same performance.
  More importantly; they may help reduce costs on the smaller indie instances that doesn't need to buy larger server instances.
  Hopefully, we'll continue to see more of these optimizations.
  
  I believe if the backend doesn't have to write as much data then you'll have less I/O operations so it should IMO have an impact on the overall speed of Lemmy (unless all of those operations are done asynchronously). Same for the reduced CPU usage, it could allow for more stuff in parallel.
- Funnily enough, this is the feature that can speed up the performance by doing less calls:
  The federation code now includes a check for dead instances which is used when sending activities. This helps to reduce the amount of outgoing POST requests, and also reduce server load.

How do you turn on endless scrolling? I'm still seeing page numbers
- Number 1 thing I miss from reddit w/ RES. 😫
  
  Infinite scroll and word filtering. If I see one more post about "AI", Musk, Twitter, or fake superconductors, I might have to get off the computer for 10 whole minutes.
- Strange it worked out of the box for me.
- I also have no infinite scroll.
  Edit: It seems to be autoloading new comments, like in this thread that is long. But there is no infinite scroll on the feed pages.
  
  It seems to be autoloading new comments, like in this thread that is long.
  Is there a way to turn this off? I don’t like infinite scroll
- It's a bit confusing. The backend added support for infinite scrolling, but lemmy-ui(the front end) hasn't landed that change yet.

Looks like the upgrade is done and was a quick and easy success, thank you Devs!

Thank you for the heads up!!
2pm EST for us silly Freedum Unit folks.
- EDT actually, not EST.
  
  oh yeah, forgot about that. Could've just put ET.

Smooth! Curious about the new DB size
- Down from 12GB to 1.8GB....
  
  Wow, thats awesome for the backups and scalability!!
- Me too. Creating a db dump now..

Why are these announcements the only place I am finding out the Lemmy has an update? I figured there would be more top level discussions about it on Lemmy. Maybe I am just not following the correct communities.
- There is an official announcement here: https://lemmy.ml/post/2540874
- If announcements of Lemmy releases are what you're after, !announcements@lemmy.ml is a place for you. But in broader picture, subsequent updates are usually just not that big of a deal.
- Each server admin decides how to publish announcements, some have a mastodon account, some have a separate website, some might post on a different Lemmy server, like !Fediverse@lemmy.ml, someone would likely post up there after the fact if the server is down for a while without apparent explanation.
- https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/tags will have up to date information

Thanks as usual for the transparency, y’all.

Awesome! It’s great to see thing become snappier and better since I joined Lemmy.
Reddit would almost never update unless it was a pants on fire situation or they would force feed features that no one wanted or even was tested properly.
A big thank you to everyone involved, FROM those taking the time to submit bug descriptions in a reproducible manner and those making feature requests or those simply upvoting and pointing out the most needed patch/updates TO simultaneously amateur, newly minted coders and veteran developpers pushing small and big patches to fix anything from typos, reformatting old code, cleaning almost unnoticeable UI object, transition less performing backend modules or secure/harden of all these moving parts.
I am glad to witness and be a part of the perpetual progress of the fediverse.

Will it change the behaviour of sorting by hot? seeing post from years ago is funny
- Yes, the 0.18.3 changelog has Fixing hot_ranks and scores to append a published sort as one of the items.
  
  Very nice!

Thanks to you and all the dev team behind this ❤🙇🏻‍♂️

Thanks for all the fine work, dudes

Maybe I’m missing it, but I don’t see the option for infinite scroll anywhere. How do I add that?
- Same here, no such option to activate, and no infinite scroll on the feed.

Thank yuuu

Good to see for Lemmy.

anyone see where “infinite scroll” is?

the best server! thank you

Any idea who might be launching the ddos attacks?
- Haters. Groups paid by Steve Huffman. Script kiddies. Any rich trust fund pissant with a couple hundo to spend on the dark web.
  
  Groups paid by Steve Huffman
  Any basis for this conspiracy theory?

good luck!

5 minutes to go. Fingers crossed for a smooth upgrade.

Thanks for your amazing work as always!

Thanks so much for all you do, man. I’ll get those stickers up ASAP <3

A website which should let you check what time that is for your local time zone; although I used Central Europe Summer Time (CEST) instead of Central Europe Time (CET) and I'm not sure if that's right.

EDIT: App closed, cache cleared - back to normal.
This is odd. ALL only has 9 posts. Subscriptions has 1. Refreshing makes no change.
Android, Thunder app. API issue?
I just checked via Firefox - all OK so I will post to the Thunder app community. Any other apps having issues?

Will calckey.world be renamed as well, as upstream abandoned the calckey name?
- Not renamed. A new server will be started where ppl can migrate to. Yet to determine a new name as firefish.world is taken..
- I'm curious about this as well. I've looked into Firefish a bit and it looks interesting, but I can't seem to follow Lemmy communities from the flagship instance Firefish.Social.
  Works on calckey.world, though.
  
  Calckey.world also runs Firefish 1.0

Any idea if 18.3 will be able to provide more security?
- in some ways: they now sanitize input so things like the xss attack a while ago is much much harder.
  will it solve the ddos attacks they're experiencing? nope.
  
  Doesn't it drastically improve performance? I'd say that will help with ddos, more requests can slip through before it affects performance
- https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/RELEASES.md#major-changes
  
  This version brings major optimizations to the database queries, which significantly reduces CPU usage. There is also a change to the way federation activities are stored, which reduces database size by around 80%. Special thanks to @phiresky for their work on DB optimizations.
  The federation code now includes a check for dead instances which is used when sending activities. This helps to reduce the amount of outgoing POST requests, and also reduce server load.
  In terms of security, Lemmy now performs HTML sanitization on all messages which are submitted through the API or received via federation. Together with the tightened content-security-policy from 0.18.2, cross-site scripting attacks are now much more difficult.

my body is ready

Thanks for the notice, I've upgraded my instance as well.

Awesome changelog, love optimizations!

that was quick!

Great work. I prefer some downtime to twAtter anyday.

Nice! Just updated my own self-hosted instance, went super smooth and quick.

I hope this isn't what brought down lemmy.one, I'm seeking refugee status from them. :)
Good luck!

Looks good here, thanks!

Is that why I got cloudflare banned last night? All I did was click my Local Top Day bookmark.
- It's just Cloudflare being sensitive lately because of the ongoing attacks. Check out status.lemmy.world.

Amazing job!

Very fast update and congrats on the reduction of the db size!

Did you change the site's database management system?
- No, it's just the tables/indexes and application were changed by the Lemmy developers.

Is there way to finally fix the bug causing user stats to reset every time?
- Those stats are not a Lemmy feature, they are a feature of the app you use. (If I understand correctly).

I can't tell if this is a new liftoff bug, or related to the recent migration.. it's when trying to open the list of places I'm subscribed to

Wait, wasn't it upgraded already to 0.18.3?
- No?

142 comments